BACKGROUND Co-infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among HIV infected individuals especially in developing countries. Early initiation of cART in these patients when CD4+ T cell count is less than 200cells/mm3 has reduced disease progression and mortality. However for patients with higher CD4+ T cell counts greater than 350cells/mm3 eviden...

BACKGROUND CD4 cell count is a strong predictor of the subsequent risk of AIDS or death in HIV-infected patients initiating combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). It is not known whether the rate of CD4 cell decline prior to therapy is related to prognosis and should, therefore, influence the decision on when to initiate cART. METHODS AND FINDINGS We carried out survival analyses of patie...

Estrogen reduces brain injury after experimental cerebral ischemia in part through a genomic mechanism of action. Using DNA microarrays, we analyzed the genomic response of the brain to estradiol, and we identified a transcript, cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART), that is highly induced in the cerebral cortex by estradiol under ischemic conditions. Using in vitro and in vivo m...

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART)-IR axons densely innervate the thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) neurons in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN), partly arising from neuronal perikarya in the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus. The source of the remaining CART innervation, however, is unknown. We have recently demonstrated that neurons co-containing adrenaline and CAR...

BACKGROUND The development of HIV drug resistance and subsequent virological failure are often cited as potential disadvantages of early cART initiation. However, their long-term probability is not known, and neither is the role of duration of infection at the time of initiation. METHODS Patients enrolled in the UK Register of HIV seroconverters were followed-up from cART initiation to last H...

Administration of cocaine and amphetamine increases cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) expression in the rat striatum (Douglass et al., 1995). CART mRNA is highly expressed in different parts of the human and rat brain, including hippocampus (Douglass et al., 1995; Couceyro et al., 1997; Kuhar and Yoho, 1999; Hurd and Fagergren, 2000). The presence of CART peptide 55-102 immun...

this paper deals with a globally convergent adaptive and sliding mode control of a cart-pole inverted pendulum for trajectory tracking in the presence of a bounded measurement noise and parameter uncertainty. two kinds of controllers have been used for evaluation of tracking error in presence of a bounded noise; as a result, we want to compare that at what time we can see the convergence of tra...

background: our study aimed to determine if alteration of metabolic parameters is associated with the severity of human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) infection, progress to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (aids), or with the type of antiretroviral treatment (art).materials and methods: in a cross-sectional study among 114 hiv infected patients, we measured hematological and biochemical parame...

Sustained immune activation during chronic HIV infection is considered to augment co-morbidity and mortality. Effective combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) has shown to dampen immune activation especially during the first year cART, but the effects of long-term cART in patients without major comorbidities remains under-investigated. We performed a comprehensive analysis including cellular...

CART peptides are anorexigenic and are widely expressed in the central and peripheral nervous systems, as well as in endocrine cells in the pituitary, adrenal medulla and the pancreatic islets. To study the role of CART in islet function, we used CART null mutant mice (CART KO mice) and examined insulin secretion in vivo and in vitro, and expression of islet hormones and markers of beta-cell fu...